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SAB completes Hyperion financial rollout with 8th Man

7th of May 2008 >

 

8th Man Consulting has successfully completed a Hyperion Financial Management consulting project with South African Breweries (SAB), a subsidiary of SABMiller, to upgrade its existing global reporting and consolidation tool and ensure Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.

 

“The number one measure of success of the consulting process,” says Andrew Blyth, financial manager: Divisional Finance at SAB, “is that the consulting team have come and are leaving with the new system implemented and running smoothly. The SAB team in place is entirely self-sufficient on a new reporting tool implemented globally in six months.”

“We consulted to give the SAB team the knowledge to implement, use and maintain Hyperion Financial Management in the shortest possible timeframe and leave without any consulting dependency,” says Adrian van der Merwe, MD of 8th Man Consulting. “They’ve not had to contact us again since we completed the project. We believe that’s an exceptional outcome because it’s not the norm in the IT consulting business.”

SAB’s Hyperion project was driven by its central group out of the UK that had opted to upgrade and standardise its global financial reporting system. Locally, 8th Man helped SAB with its rollout to 30 users, formulate processes, train users and identify and resolve issues as they occurred.

SAB is one of the largest brewers by volume in the world and was the first industrial company to list on the JSE, in 1897. It pays in excess of R8 billion in taxes annually and will invest R5 billion in facility upgrades, efficiencies and operations between 2005 and 2009.

While the local operation’s Hyperion project kicked off in October last year, 8th Man was brought on board in January 2007 and left by August.

Column 1“SABMiller was proactive by hiring its own local Hyperion Financial Management expert to provide onboard knowledge and support,” says Van der Merwe. “Clients don’t normally go to those lengths, and it’s a very good idea. It helped the project tremendously.”

Locally, however, SAB’s team was inexperienced with Hyperion Financial Management. Although the brewer’s team replaced Hyperion Enterprise, any product resemblance is in name only.

“Ownership of the product moved to London,” says SAB’s Blyth. “We don’t need to retain people to look after it here any more since users are self-sufficient and we retain technical expertise centrally in the UK.” During the implementation, problems and queries were escalated to the UK office.

“The UK technical team didn’t necessarily resolve problems in the best way for local conditions,” says Van der Merwe. “Bringing us on board allowed SAB to do that. It worked so well they began feeding resolutions back to the group office.

“One piece of functionality we helped them develop was the ability to do freeform pivot table work in Excel based on Hyperion Financial Management’s ad hoc analysis functionality. It allows them to drill down into the data, which the static Web front-end doesn’t allow them to do – it’s far more interactive.”

“We encountered a few designs issues and problems and the team assisted us immensely to get portions of the new design implemented at group level in London,” says Blyth.

“The most interesting thing from my point of view is that we didn’t consult to implement; we consulted to give them the knowledge in a short time frame that they needed to implement the product themselves,” says Van der Merwe. “Our role was largely centred on the users, on getting the people on board with the application because that’s the biggest threat to adoption of new technology. A critical component of that was the tremendous buy-in from the executives at SAB.”

“From our internal perspective this was one of the best run systems implementation projects I’ve experienced,” says Blyth.